Aspects of context

We may summarize the above discussion by saying that

context is dynamic: it is formed by the interplay of factors over time;

context is always to some extent local.

For this to be useful, however, we need some more down-to- earth, detailed, categories with which to think. Here the literature of English language teaching (ELT) can be useful: ELT is taught in a very wide variety of contexts and so the professional literature tends to be more explicit about the subject.

In Designing Language Courses, for example, Kathleen Graves discusses ‘what is meant by context’ by developing a parallel between teaching and architectural design:

Imagine . . . you have been commissioned to design a house. Where do you start? Having watched [architects] design and oversee the building of houses . . . I know that if have to design a house you don’t begin with sketches, because you have no basis for the design. You begin with specifica- tions. For example, where is the site, how big is it, what are its particular features? What is the time line? What materials are available locally? And so on.

Graves concludes that ‘designing a course is similar to designing a house. You need to have a lot of information in order to design a structure that will fit the context’. She provides a model of educational context under five headings, namely:

The people (students and other stakeholders). The physical setting.

The nature of the course and institution. Teaching resources.

Time.

We have already considered some aspects of these contextual factors (Chapter 3, for example, discusses the role of stakeholders, including pupils) and others will be discussed elsewhere below. Here we will focus on (a) time and (b) physical setting.

Graves helpfully breaks ‘time’ into a series of factors, each of which can be considered in relation to planning. They are: (a) the overall time allocation of the course (the number of hours and the span of time), (b) the frequency of lessons, (c) the duration of lessons, (d) the timing of lessons (On which days? At what time of day?), (e) where lessons fit into students’ schedules and (f) students’ punctuality. To these I would add two more factors, namely (g) what interruptions to the course may be anticipated (for example, exam leave, field trips) and (h) how much time outside lessons may students be expected to devote to work for the course.

Using the categories identified above, critically examine your time- table and schedule for the term and/or year. In what ways does the consideration of temporal factors affect your planning and preparation?

Similarly, Graves breaks ‘physical setting’ into a number of different aspects. They are: (a) the location of the school, (b) the classroom – its size, the furniture it contains, the lighting, and noise and (c) the question of whether the teaching is always in the same classroom.

To see how such factors affect teaching, let’s consider two of the schools that I have taught in. In one I taught in a ground floor classroom constructed of modern building materials. It was carpeted, clean and bright. Along one side of the room was a series of built-in drawers with a strong wooden top a couple of feet or so from the ground. At the front of the class was a walk-in, lockable, stock cupboard. Just outside the classroom was a small foyer, with enough room for a desk or two and a few chairs, around which was clustered three other classrooms. On the other side of the room was a fire exit, leading outside.

In the other, my classroom was on the second floor of an older, inter-war, building. The building was in a style known as ‘post- office Georgian’. The classroom was again well lit, though the bottoms of the windows were higher off the ground, making the windows difficult to look out of. The tables were larger and heavier than those in the first classroom: they were sturdier, but more difficult to move. There was no carpet. The classroom was deeper than the first. At the back of the room was a lockable door providing the only entrance into a small stockroom that was also well lit. Outside the classroom was a brick corridor that ran the entire length of the building, with a series of other classrooms leading off along one side and a set of fire doors half way along.

Both rooms were, in their own ways, typical classrooms. Across the country, there must be thousands of rooms of similar styles. Yet though typical, they were obviously very different from each other – and the differences affected the kinds of lessons I planned.

The first room leant itself to flexible teaching: it was easy to pull back the furniture and for pupils to sit, entirely safely, on top of the drawers along the side of the room, thus creating space for drama work of various kinds. The carpeting helped to ensure that such work – and the moving of furniture – was not too noisy. And there were spaces (the foyer outside and, at a pinch, the stock cupboard) where one or two pupils could work away from the rest of the class.

The second room had the virtue of being larger, but it was much less flexible. I cleared a space in the stockroom where two pupils could work comfortably. That helped a little. But the only space

outside was the corridor and that was quite unsuitable: noise echoed along it and so pupils in the corridor were likely to distract other classes. Lessons were inevitably more constrained.

In contrasting these rooms, I have focused on the practical aspect of the two spaces. This does not, however, entirely capture the difference. There is also the overall ‘feel’ of the space to be considered. The first felt convenient, comfortable, unremarkable but unobjectionable and not entirely unhomely. The second felt austerely institutional – the high windows, echoing corridors, the sheer rigidity all betokened a dull, drab view of schooling that needed actively to be countered.

Consider two educational spaces that are familiar to you.

What values do the architecture and design seem to incorporate? How would you describe the feel of each space?

What constraints would each space impose on your teaching there?

And what opportunities does each offer?

Ethos

Above we have considered some of the contextual factors itemized by Kathleen Graves. As we’ve seen, Graves includes in her list of factors the nature of the institution. Here I would like to draw attention to one aspect of that factor, namely ethos. It is difficult to say exactly what ethos is. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) char- acterizes ethos as ‘characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment of a . . . community; the “genius” of an institution or system’. That seems to me to capture it pretty well, yet it does so only by using other words, such as ‘spirit’ and ‘tone’, which are also difficult to define. They are difficult not only to define, but also to measure. How would one construct, for example, an index of ‘tone’?

Given these difficulties of definition and measurement, it is not surprising that the concept of ethos is rather under-represented in the professional literature. Look through the indexes of standard

texts on teaching and you will often find the term ‘ethos’ missing. Similarly it is rather under-researched. Yet this does not at all mean that the ethos of an institution is unimportant.

Quite the reverse. Indeed, if you look and listen to the messages that schools and colleges send – for example to new staff or to prospective parents – you will see that a concern to communicate an ethos is high priority. When newcomers transgress the defin- ing lines of an institution’s ethos, they tend to be quickly alerted to the fact. There is usually a ready concern to communicate ‘the way we do things here’.

So ethos matters, yet is difficult to pin down. How then to think about the role of the institution’s ethos in one’s teaching? There are two useful ways to get a hold of this concept. The first is to ask newcomers – new pupils, new teachers, teaching students, visitors and so on. Until they have got used to the ethos of the place, they will be conscious of the features that distinguish it and able to articulate those features. If there is a way of capturing this – for example, in informal notes or journal-keeping, or through con- versation – this can prove invaluable. But this needs to be done very quickly, because most newcomers rapidly begin to adapt to the ethos of their surroundings and to take its distinguishing features for granted. I reckon that there is usually a window of a fortnight at most in which to capture a newcomer’s observations before they lose their freshness of vision.

The second way to reflect on the ethos of your institution is to focus on one crucial aspect of it, namely the way that people around you see the relationship between teacher and pupil. When I think about the differences in ethos between the institutions I have taught in, they have always been reflected in (perhaps ‘embodied in’ would be more accurate) the way in which this central relationship is conceived. I am tempted to suggest that, where two institutions actually share the same view of the teacher–pupil relationship, any differences in ethos between the two places are likely to prove unimportant.

People’s conceptions of the teacher–pupil relationship have two main components. The first is distance. Do the people around you think that the relationship should be quite close – characterized

The second component is status. What is the predominant view of the ideal relative status of pupils and teacher? Should they be on a level? Or should one party have a higher status than the other? And if so, how much higher? Again it can be useful to plot this on a spectrum (the higher the ideal status of teachers is supposed to be, relative to pupils, the higher on the spectrum as shown in Figure 4.2):

by, for example, friendliness, informality, personality, warmth and so on – or should it be more distant, characterized by formality, impersonality and coolness? It can be helpful to compare institutions by, however impressionistically, placing them on a spectrum according to the predominant views of the ideal distance between teachers and pupils as shown in Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1 Teacher–pupil relationship (distance)

Close Distant

Relatively high status of teachers

Relatively high status of pupils

Figure 4.2 Teacher–pupil relationship (status)

One can then combine these two to plot the overall position of the ideal relationship according to the predominant view in the institution as shown in Figure 4.3:

(A) Consider educational institutions with which you are familiar. Try plotting them according to the predominant views of the ideal relationship between teachers and pupils. Note that it is the people’s views of the ideal that we are concerned with – and it is the predominant view, not your own view, that we are concerned with here.

(B) What implications might the differences have for your teaching?

I suggest that, though the concept of ethos is a subtle one, it is useful on a pragmatic level to simplify the way one thinks about it. The working assumptions I have proposed here are:

Differences in ethos may be captured by focusing on differ- 1.

ences in how the relationship between teachers and pupils is conceived

That relationship may be defined by two key variables – 2.

distance and status

Official documents published by educational institutions obviously need to be interpreted warily. They rarely say, for example, that ‘we treat staff and pupils like dirt and tolerate low standards’! Yet, for the purposes of distinguishing ethos, it can at least be useful to look at differences in what institutions say they aim to do.

Figure 4.3 Teacher–pupil relationship (two dimensions)

Relatively high status of teachers

Close relationship Distant relationship

In the appendix to this chapter are statements from the websites of three educational institutions. The ﬁ rst is Stantonbury Campus (www.stantonbury.org.uk), a co-educational comprehensive school in Milton Keynes. The second is Dulwich College (www.dulwich. org.uk), an independent school for boys in suburban London. The third is Hampshire College (www.hampshire.edu), a post- compulsory liberal arts college in New Hampshire, USA.

Questions

Consider first the two schools, Stantonbury Campus and Dulwich College, as contexts for education. So far as can be ascertained from these documents:

(A) What do they have in common? (B) What contrasts can you discern?

(C) Consider a course that you teach. What differences might you encounter in terms of how you might be expected to teach the course in each of these schools? To what extent might you conform to these expectations?

Now consider Hampshire College. I do not know whether any students from either of the two schools have actually gone on to Hampshire College, but supposing that they did:

(D) In the case of students from (a) Stantonbury Campus and (b) Dulwich College, what continuities and changes would they be likely to experience?

Bringing it all together

The argument of this chapter has been that, in planning and preparing to teach, context matters. The same lesson, delivered in different contexts, will have different outcomes (indeed, will in some sense turn out not to have been in fact the ‘same’ lesson). Context is a wide-ranging concept, one that is difficult to charac- terize. It certainly involves an interplay of factors over time. Those

factors include: people; place; the nature of the course and the institution – including its ethos, resources and time.

I have left until last perhaps the most important consideration when it comes to deciding how context affects, or should affect, one’s teaching. That is, there are always two questions involved:

What is the context in which one is teaching? 1.

How does one respond to that? 2.

It is undoubtedly useful to get clear what the context is – the more contextual information you can acquire, the better. But there is then a second set of decisions to make. To what extent should one seek to perpetuate the context as it is – to accept, support or promote it? And to what extent to challenge, modify or reform it?

Though I’m reluctant to reduce the content of this chapter to a single sentence, if I had to, it would be:

Reflect on what you know about where you are teaching and ask yourself what the implications are for your teaching.

Ethos

Questions

Bringing it all together

Further reading